A New Bike Lane That Could Save Lives and Make Cycling More Popular

We have another big problem at least in Chicago, and that's that it's such a polarizing issue that it's easy to make news articles and stir up so much inflammatory debate that any sensible lawmaker is likely terrified to even approach that territory. (See the tribune and John Kass' infamously baiting articles that get tons of hits)

That is a way to look at it. Other ones are that it prioritizes the human scale over industrial scale, clean(er) air over pollution, an environment that keeps the population healthy over one promoting a sedentary lifestyle, an environment where people interact over one that distances people from each other.

Also, including public transport: in many urban zones, public transport and biking infrastructure are large reasons why the city isn't gridlocked 24x7. In many Dutch city centers, that separate bicycle lane takes more traffic than the two car lanes alongside it. One can argue that a bike lane that gets used, even if it is built at the cost of a car lane, makes the other car lanes in the street less busy.

If you accept a few of those as valid claims, you are more likely to accept the introduction of separate bike lanes.

"These problems won't be fixed until protected bike lanes are the norm, rather than the exception"

Agreed.

"and following bike lane laws are [...] heavily enforced by police."

That, I disagree with. If you still need strong enforcement, you aren't there yet. If almost every car driver also is, at times, a cyclist, or at least knows how it was to cycle regularly, you don't need strong enforcement anymore.

Now I arrive at work and I'm soaked either from sweat or rain. Now what? I can stink up the office with my B.O. all day while I desperately try to dry my clothes. Or I go through the indignity of getting to work, waiting an hour to cool-down and dry off, then trying to change out of my riding kit into some decent professional work clothes in a dirty stall in the men's room after giving myself a paper towel bath in the sink.

Then at the end of a long work-day, reverse this absurd course of events? Now instead of a 10 minute drive and 8.5 hours at the office followed by a 10 minute drive home (total time commitment under 9 hours), I've succeeded in turning my 9 hours of work time into a 10.5-11.5 hours of work time so I can put myself dangerously out in traffic, exposed to the elements and be uncomfortable the entire day and can't go anywhere else once I'm there?

Even if the stars aligned and I had door-to-door bike trails, I wouldn't partake in this uncivilized madness. I'd much rather just get home earlier, not smelling like exhaust fumes and body odor and go do a leisurely jog around my neighborhood park for a half hour or go to one of the 3 gyms next to my house where I can ride a stationary bike in a temperature controlled environment while watching TV.

Edit: for the record, I support dedicated bike lanes and infrastructure almost everywhere because of all the side benefits it brings. But I'm also not treating it as a religious issue, mindful of acute practicalities that explain the world better than assuming one of the most technologically sophisticated countries on the planet doesn't like to ride bikes to work because they're too stupid to do so.

Some cities are like that, and others aren't. People can vote with their feet. Guess which one people like better? (Hint: People have been moving out of dense cities for 100 years now.)

Are you planning on forcing people to accommodate themselves to your definition of the perfect city?

> We have disparate clusters/districts related to activities like 'work', 'play', 'shop', and 'sleep', rather than having these constructs evenly interspersed.

Is that supposed to be a bad thing? The world is not sim-city. Not everyone wants to live near a shopping area.

> We have supermarkets instead of markets.

Markets are not large enough to carry everything, so when I lived in a place like that I never went to the market, so I got the worst of both worlds: High density (i.e. traffic) plus a long drive.

I moved out.

You are acting as if the layout of cities was a commandment given from on high, but actually cities are laid out as they are because people like it that way.

Edit: Here's a similar talk[2] I just found talking about adopting Dutch traffic planning to work in Vancouver.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0GA901oGe4 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrIlB6C8uqs

* The speed limit in residential zones in the Netherlands is always 50 km/h (31 mph). This doesn't seem to be the case in the U.S.

* Bicyclists are considered full first-class participants in traffic on the road in the Netherlands.

* We have no policy of allowing turning-on-right here. It seems like a dangerous thing to have if bicyclists are involved in traffic. These new bike lanes might help with this.

* In accidents involving both a car and a bicyclist, the burden of proof always lies with the driver of the car, not the bicyclist.

* Our cities are way, way smaller and arranged completely differently. Everything I need in daily life is within a 3 mile radius of my house. Convenience stores, clothes shops, electronics stores, restaurants, etc. I've never been to the U.S, but I wonder if that's the case over there.

I think the biggest problem the U.S has is that car drivers and law enforcement don't give a shit about bicyclists.

It also seems to me that the people who bike in the U.S. take it way to seriously. I could very well be wrong on this; I'm not intimately familiar with bike culture in the U.S., but to me it seems you all ride extremely fancy bikes, work up a sweat on each ride and change clothes and shower every time you hop on or off a bike. That seems like a huge effort, and if I had to do it every time I took my bike, I'd probably just say "screw this, I'll take the car". In comparison, when I commute to work, I just get on my cheap $200 bike (not the cheapest category either) in my work clothes and slowly paddle to work. If there are hills, which we don't get much in the Netherlands of course, or if there are strong head-winds, which we do get a lot, I simply paddle slower. I could be completely mistaken of course, so please do point that out, but biking in the U.S. seems like a very tiring experience.

edit Some more differences:

* Round-abouts in the Netherlands are everywhere. Bikes and pedestrians have the right of way on these. Stop-light intersections are annoying and are easily avoided in the Netherlands.

* Nearly every city center (the shopping zones) is car-free in the Netherlands.

* The roads in our cities are layed out completely differently. There are usually a few main roads with heavy car traffic and lots of smaller side roads for destination-specific traffic. These side roads are much less crowded, and less car-friendly. That means cars generally stay on the "doorgaand verkeer" (passing-through traffic) roads. These generally have separate bike paths. This works because cars and bikes don't have to intermix all the time on those roads, unlike the grid-like road system in U.S. cities.

And of course, that site has several excellent articles on all kinds of cycling infrastructure related issues, including on junction design, for example http://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2014/02/23/junction-design..., which links to http://www.protectedintersection.com, the site that the video mentions, but this Wired article forgets to link to.

I think you could imagine that when cyclists are in protected lanes (and thus are first-class citizens on the road), they won't NEED to break laws that shoe-horn them in with 2-ton automobiles.

I don't understand why any discussion of bicycles must have a comment about law-breaking cyclists. It doesn't happen with other topics even though there are plenty of other topics where lots of people involved don't follow the relevant laws.

While technically I may be a "vehicle" in the eyes of the law, in reality, I'm between a pedestrian and a "real vehicle" without the benefits of either. Add to this strange intersections with traffic, where the cars have a stop sign (side road) and the bike path traffic have the right of way (in theory). Or worse, places where bike paths strangely end leaving a biker unfamiliar with the area unsure as to how to proceed. Adopting seemingly inconsistent and strange behavior is the only way to make cycling feasible in many places. The adoption of standard ways for interaction with traffic and better signage would decrease the cognitive load required to cycle and produce more consistent cyclist/vehicle interactions.

Regardless of my dislike of certain car behavior, such as overtaking without giving space, and misjudging speed, I much prefer riding on speed limited (25mph-35mph) streets to bike paths simply because I know how to act like a car, and people generally expect me to act like a car.

For example, say a bus overtakes a cyclist and stops 40m in front. A car would signal, wait for a space, turn, then catch up to the traffic. For a bike, it needs to signal, wait for a space, then start peddling, which is very much slower than a car. A car following the bike needs to slow down creating a hazard. I experience this many times in the past few months, especially where one has to peddle up hill.

The reason I noticed this is because recently I tried electric bikes, they greatly help with the initial peddling which I feel make me less of a target for cars. An easier route for a normal bike is to take the side walk and avoid that hazard all together.

Another is when waiting for green light, bikers tend to peddle before the traffic light turns green because they can get a head start peddling. Personally I feel pressured to do so to avoid the cars behind me overtaking dangerously.

Regarding getting to work sweaty, why not ride slower? Sure, you might live in a hotter place than I do, but if you reduce your speed you'll sweat less. I think many of us on bikes are still getting out of the lead foot mentality of driving a car.

Traffic too fast can be controlled. Traffic too slow? That's one that can be solved by separated bike lanes. Look at the Netherlands and how they solve it. I personally hate the combined bike/traffic sections of Market St in San Francisco. Those are the most terrifying 7 blocks of my commute.

Not quite a replacement for showers, but this might help any people who are "that guy" if showers aren't an option: http://www.amazon.com/Wet-Ones-Antibacterial-Travel-15-Count...

Interestingly some cities and towns in England are having trouble because they are being accused of over-enforcing parking regulations in order to get income.

The amount of income they get is a reasonable amount but trivial in terms of the total budget. And people breaking parking rules are usually pretty clearly breaking an obvious rule.

But it cause great offence and distress and councils need to spend time and money explaining what they're doing and why; and also on the appeals process.

The use of roaming CCTV vehicles which travel to parking blackspots is being investigated at the moment, and might be regulated out.

I agree with the rest of your post! Offering better bike parking and some changing facilities would be helpful.

Another idea, that would not work in US cities, is to remove all road and pavement marking. There's just a broad road with no kerbs (but pavements are marked with slightly differen paving) or lines and everyone, pedestrians cyclists and vehicles just use it. Vehicles entering this area suddenly slow down and look out for people.

It happens all the time and it's a function of poor design. I'm not sure what the right fix is (preventing right turns on some Alma crossings? Forced right turn lane to the right of a green lane?). With this intersection at least the cyclists start out ahead of the traffic when waiting on a red -- but if the light is green and a cyclist is at the speed of traffic then this design does nothing to prevent right hooks...

Before you say "but that means that there is less time for cars to cross the intersection", consider the fact that a lot of the people using bikes would otherwise have to use other means of transportation, resulting (at least partially) in reduced traffic.

Regarding the lights - sure. Cars have a special light, pedestrians have a special light. Why wouldn't bikes? Having a usable bike infrastructure that doesn't make bikers feel like they're going to die at every intersection would promote safer biking. I'll run a red light on my bike because I can see the cars coming from my left and right, but I can't see the car coming from behind and turning right into me.

In Washington, DC, 4.1 percent of working residents regularly commuted by bike last year; it was 3.8 percent in San Francisco, 2.3 percent in Philadelphia, 2 percent in Boston, 1.6 percent in Chicago, and 1 percent in NYC. NYC increased from .6 percent to 1 percent over the course of a few years by investing more heavily in bike infrastructure.

One thing to keep in mind is that these numbers are for daily commuters. When you look at casual riders, people running errands, etc, and then hone in on certain neighborhoods the numbers can sky rocket. The Brooklyn chapter of Transportation Alternatives has done mode (of transportation) counts in certain neighborhoods and in many areas count 20-30% of all traffic on the street as being bikes, going over 50% in some neighborhoods for some sprints.

When you take driving lessons in Germany, an essential part of it is how to handle traffic around you. There are many intersections you need to watch out for pedestrians and bicycles, when turning left, and the hard part is, sometimes bicycles drive faster than cars!

But when you have a lot of bicycles, this also gives room for new ideas like mobile repair services: http://www.startnext.de/en/harryandmarv

Bikes, trains, buses and walkable neighborhoods all offer alternatives to cars. If a city only had the last three but not bikes, I expect more people would have cars.

Some people uses cases would be fully covers by the final three, but some might find it more difficult and drive.

For example, I live in Montreal. I walk, take metros, and bike. I don't like buses, and can't be bothered to figure out schedules.

Without bikes, I'd just walk and metro. But if I didn't live near a metro, and couldn't bike, I'd probably use the local short term car rental options more often.

All four options are complementary. Remove one, and you'll harm the ensemble.